The Noblest Shroud
by PlaidButterfly
Summary: 'Royal purple is the noblest shroud.' A story that ends and begins with the fate of Mike Schmidt.
1. Chapter 1

It was starting to rain when the purple sedan pulled up in front of the Shady Oaks Elementary School. At first, Maria Lopez didn't look up. Instead she continued running her fingers over the beads of the rosary her mother had given her. Every bead was made with olive wood, and there was a cross at the very end. Every night before her mother went to work her second job and before Maria herself went to sleep, they would pray on it. But now Maria was holding it as some sort of talisman, hoping to summon her mother there by sheer willpower.

Instead she got the man with a purple tie. He smiled - a big, white, toothy smile - at her. "You must be Maria!"

Maria didn't say anything. She just looked up at him.

He continued smiling even as he crouched down to get on her level. "Don't worry, I'm not a stranger. Your momma sent me over here to pick you up. You can trust me. See? I've got a badge and everything." He pulled at his shirt where the security guard badge gleamed.

Still, Maria was quiet. His badge _was_ very shiny, and her mother _was_ late. But this wasn't her mother. And that made her nervous.

"My name's Wayne Laroche," he said cheerfully. "I work with your momma. She makes the best pizza in the entire world for Freddy Fazbear's, and since she's late, she wanted me to come pick you up. She's gonna make you your favourite kind of pizza and you can come have a party with Freddy. Ain't that great?"

Maria thought hard for a long second. On one hand, a strange man. On the other… well, she did know that one of the places her mother worked was Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. But that was a place for rich kids. That was a place for kids who had both mommies _and_ daddies, and whose mommies didn't have to work three jobs just to feed her peanut butter sandwiches for dinner and nothing for mommy. And she was hungry. Pizza sounded good. All of it sounded good.

So Maria put the wooden rosary in her bag and stood up. "Okay, Mr. Laroche."

He laughed a great big booming laugh. "Wayne, please! You don't have to call me Mister anything. Here, I'll let you sit up front. You can probably guess, Maria, that my favourite color's purple. What's your favourite color, Maria…?"

* * *

Twenty-four hours later, Maria Lopez sighed out her last rattling breath.

"Maria?" Lauren Hunter warbled out, her voice muffled from the Bonnie suit. "Oh God, oh my God, I think she's dead. She's dead and I can't - I can't feel my legs, I can't…"

The Foxy suit, with Isaac Hunter inside it, shook. And shook. And then something sprung out, and there was an awful wet, slick gurgle, and a new bloodstain blooming around the middle.

"You need to get out," Isaac rasped. Blood ended up on Foxy's back teeth as he spoke to the Golden Freddy suit. "You need to get out, and get help, all right?"

The small boy in the Golden Freddy suit gave a pathetic whine. "But… but if I move, things are gonna spring into place, and…"

"And you'll die. So what? We're already dead."

"Oh God, Isaac, oh my God, don't say that, don't…"

"We're dying. I'm dying. You can get out," he rasped. "You can get out if you're careful." Another awful cough. Then another something ratcheted into place, this time in the head; Foxy's leg gave an awful twitch, and then Isaac was silent and still.

Lauren sobbed weakly against Bonnie's fur, but the boy in the Golden Freddy suit said nothing. Instead he wiggled around to knock the top off of the suit, and Freddy's head rolled along the floor. A few minutes later the boy was halfway out of the suit, and then all of it.

"Go," Lauren sobbed. "Go! Run before he gets back."

And so the boy ran. Out of the back rooms, into the bright light of the main building full of party-goers, each of them stuffing their faces with cheap pizza around plastic masks. Bloodstrained, bruised and scraped, but nothing worse, he did the only thing he could think to do.

Little Mike Schmidt opened his mouth and screamed, and screamed, and screamed.


	2. Chapter 2

Twenty-three years later, Mike Schmidt shrugged off his security guard uniform and tossed the shirt on his bed.

"…And for what? Minimum wage?" His girlfriend continued to rant on speakerphone. "I know this has got to be some… some jarhead stubbornness or something, Mike, but it's not worth it."

Mike sighed, picking up the phone and putting it in his lap as he stretched before starting to wheel his way to the kitchen as his girlfriend continued to talk. "I'm sorry, honey, I just don't see it."

"Well, it's a job, Janine."

"It's minimum wage! You're risking your life for - for pennies! Wait, wait. I know what this is. Some sort of facing-your-fears thing, isn't it? Your parents told me what happened…"

"I'm fine. Really. If I can survive an IED, I can survive this."

"It isn't healthy, Mike. It's not."

"It's just some robots in animal suits. I'll be fine." Mike swung open his fridge, grabbing for a beer, and paused with the drink in his hand. "…I don't know. I'll probably quit tomorrow."

"You should quit now. That place isn't right. I know I'm nagging you but we can find you a better job."

"Out of all the people scrambling to hire wheelchair-bound cripples, you mean?"

"Out of all the people scrambling to hire _veterans_ , that's what."

For a long moment Mike was silent. Then, with a new steeliness in his expression, he put the can of beer back and closed his fridge. When he spoke next his tone was almost dreamy.

"You know, Janine, you're right. I think I _am_ going to do something."

* * *

Pasquale Hernandez opened the passenger door of Mike Schmidt's van, hopping in and greeting him with a fistbump. "Hey, man! Thought you said you were staying in tonight."

"Changed my mind." Mike's smile was strained and thin. "Listen, Paz, you know how you keep saying you owe me one…"

"Dude, you pushed me out of the way of a fuckin' IUD. I owe you more than one," Paz said as he buckled his seatbelt.

For a long moment Mike was silent as he used the hand-accelerator in the modified car. Paz, however, sniffed the air, immediately frowning. "Mike, why's the van smell like gasoline?"

"I'm calling in that favor today."

"That doesn't answer my question," Paz said nervously. "Did you just fill it up, or…?"

Calmly, Mike Schmidt reached over to the side of his seat, pulled out a handgun, and pointed at Paz.

"Woah, woah, what the hell - Mike, put that thing away, whatever's wrong we can talk it out -"

"Don't worry," Mike interrupted. "I'm not going to shoot you or anything. I need your help. This is just me threatening you so that when the police ask later what's gone on, you aren't liable, all right?"

And then he calmly put the gun into its holster at his waist. Paz continued to stare at him, pressed against the side of the car.

"Mike," Paz finally said, "what are we doing, exactly?"

"We're burning down Freddy Fazbear's."

Paz gulped solidly. "Look, I know you have some… history there, but it's just a pizza place, I don't think -"

"There's _evil_ at work," Mike snapped, his voice finally rising from calm for the first time. "I've been there a week, and I've seen it."

"Mike, I don't think…"

"You don't have to think. You just have to trust me, and to help me." Mike looked over to Paz out of the corner of his eye before returning his gaze to the dimly-lit nighttime streets. "That's worth two legs and a lifetime of colostomy bags, right?"

Paz gulped.

The last tinges of twilight had long faded by the time they turned into the parking lot of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. Mutely, they set about their work, dousing the outside of the building. Paz stood back for the most part, nervously pacing in small circles. He paused to open one of the doors. "Shouldn't we…"

"Don't!" Mike called out from the other side of the parking lot. "Don't you dare open that door. …Just light it up."

The fire started slowly, licking the building's walls before finally rolling up to the rooftop. As it began to penetrate the building itself, Paz looked increasingly nervous - both of the fire, and of the fact that Mike went over to his van, opening the back, and pulling out several shotguns.

"You'll need this," he grunted out, tossing a shotgun over to Paz, and then a couple of rounds of deer shot.

"It's a pizza place?" Paz's voice went up in vague inquiry as he nonetheless loaded the gun. "We're not going to shoot at the firemen, are we? Look, Mike, I've done what you said, but I'm not -"

"Not for the firemen," Mike said tersely. "Just this." He pointed at the burning building, and as if on cue, siren-like screaming began to come from the flames. The noise was high-pitched, like a child's wail, but it was one Mike had been bracing himself to hear every single night. It coupled with the fire sirens in the distance that were growing ever-closer.

That was when something came out of the flames.

Only one had been fast enough to outrun the holocaust. Foxy burst out of the fire, still screaming, fabric singed and flaming to reveal the skeleton of metal underneath. Paz froze in fear, even as he was being charged down, and the first gunshot rang out. Foxy staggered back as Mike reloaded the shotgun, and then, still screaming, lunged for him. Another shot - Mike's wheelchair was flung back from the recoil - and finally Foxy crumbled to the ground, the shrieking growing increasingly distorted as the fire overtook the animatronic.

Paz cowered, breathless. The shouts of the firemen grew closer, and it wasn't long before the fire sirens were joined with police sirens.

"Hands up! Put your hands up!" Paz gladly complied, but it took a moment for Mike, cool and collected as he was, to let go of his shotgun and put his hands in the air.

As they handcuffed him, Mike said nothing. Instead he watched the fire engulfing the building.

One by one, like lights going out on a long summer night, the screaming ceased.

Mike Schmidt didn't speak much about that night. Not beyond giving an enigmatic smile. He always maintained that he was perfectly sane and in the right, even when his court-appointed lawyer said otherwise. And he always told everyone how the night after he dreamed about Maria Lopez, and Lauren and Isaac Hunter, and all of them smiling, free, and happy again.

He didn't tell them about the black shadow behind their smiling faces. He didn't tell them about how something was still waiting, watching, and _seething_.

No, Mike Schmidt just smiled and told them about how easily he slept these days.


End file.
